To learn more about the advantages of Exchange Online Archiving, download Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving: Service Description, available on the Microsoft Download Center as part of the Office 365 for Enterprise Service Descriptions.

A hybrid deployment connects an Office 365 organization to your on-premises Exchange 2010 organization by configuring the hybrid features of one or more on-premises Exchange 2010 servers. These Exchange 2010 services must be updated to Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Exchange 2010 Server (SP3) or greater to enable hybrid functionality with the latest release of Office 365. After you configure a hybrid deployment using the Hybrid Configuration wizard, users in the on-premises organization can connect to Exchange Online archives that are located in the Office 365 organization and have other hybrid deployment features enabled. To learn more about hybrid deployments, see Understanding Hybrid Deployments with Exchange 2010 SP3.

To configure a hybrid deployment to support Exchange Online Archiving in your Exchange 2010 organization, a comprehensive deployment checklist with step-by-step procedures is available on the Microsoft Download Center. To select the appropriate checklist, you must first decide if your organization wants to use single sign-on. Single sign-on is optional for hybrid deployments, but strongly recommended. If you want to configure a full hybrid deployment and select different deployment options, you should see the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant for more information.

With single sign-on, which is based on Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0, users can access both their personal (on-premises) archive and Exchange Online archive with a single user name and password. Single sign-on also benefits administrators. For example, you can control account policies through the on-premises Active Directory, which gives you the ability to manage password policies, workstation restrictions, lock-out controls, and more, without having to perform additional tasks in Office 365.

To deploy single sign-on, you must also deploy additional servers to support it. If you don't configure single sign-on, users with an Exchange Online archive will need to use separate user names and passwords for their on-premises and archive mailboxes.

If you want to configure a limited hybrid deployment to support Exchange Online Archiving in your Exchange 2010 organization, select the deployment checklist that is appropriate based on your decision regarding the use of single sign-on:

If you've already configured a full hybrid deployment in your Exchange 2010 organization and want to enable your deployment to support Exchange Online Archiving, you must purchase an Exchange Online Archiving subscription with Office 365. On-premises support for Exchange Online archiving is automatically configured and enabled by the Hybrid Configuration wizard. For more information about subscriptions, see Exchange Online Archiving subscription.

After Exchange Online Archiving is deployed in your organization, there are several management tasks you can perform. Managing Exchange Online archives is very similar to managing personal archives (also called on-premises archives).